Mnce hunting is the main

Mnce hunting is the main means by which game managers keep deer herds in balance with their food supply, the regulations tend to be more liberal where Virginia’s deer are more numerous and difficult to harvest. The area in which you hunt determines whether you legally can hunt with rifle, shotgun, or dogs, whether you can shoot one deer or two, whether you can shoot an antlerless deer and when you can shoot an antlerless deer. Read the regulations carefully so you will be able to hunt without fear of violating the law. According to statistics compiled in 1963, Virginia’s whitetailed deer herd is the tenth largest in the nation. North Carolina is the only state in the Southeast with a greater number of whitetails, but Virginia harvested 10,000 more deer than North Carolina in 1963. Virginia’s game biologists attempt to regulate the hunting kill to harvest about 20 percent of the deer herd each hunting season. The whitetail’s ability toreproduce explains its abundance. There’s reason to bei lieve that up to 35 percent of a healthy herd could be harvested by hunters if other mortality causes were kept to a minimum, without reducing the number of deer available the next November. It’s a rare Virginia whitetail that weights as much as 150 pounds field-dressed at the checking station. Of 256 deer weighed at checking stations in 7 southwestern Virginia counties in 1963, the heaviest animal was a 3 1/2 year old doe weighing 147 pounds. Within the 256-deer sample, 170 weighed no more than 90 pounds. The heaviest whitetailed deer occur in the northern part of their range and several bucks weighing more than 400 pounds are on record from such states as New York, Vermont, Michigan, and Minnesota. The largest official record of a whitefail buck known to me was shot by Carl Lenander in cook county, Minnesota, in November, 1962. It had a live weight of 511 pounds. The size of deer, and the growth of antlers, are closely related to the amount and quality of food available to the deer throughout the year. jTliis is why game biologists ask you to take your deer to a checking station where they have an opportunity to weigh, sex, and age it. The trained biologist can examine the lower jaw of the deer and tell by the teeth present and their wear the approximate age of the deer. The number of animals in different age classes from the same range indicates the age structure of the deer population and the success of the annual harvest. The relationship between the weight of the deer and its age helps a biologist to determine if the deer have an ade-j quate diet. Thus, even in! death, the deer helps us to obtain knowledge useful in managing those that survive the hunting season. An analysis would undoubtedly reveal that our whitetailed deer herd was worth millions of dollars to the economy of the State. But who could place a dollar value on the man-hours collectively devoted to one of the finest forms of outdoor recreation, hunting the whitetailed deer?

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